What New Yorker doesn’t dream of a bigger apartment? You know — a place with more storage space, more walls for books and the elusive “one more room.” But there’s a difference between a bigger apartment and a perfect apartment.
Ronald Bentley and Salvatore LaRosa, who are partners in the New York design firm B Five Studio as well as in life, understand that difference, and their recently completed apartment on the Brooklyn waterfront offers numerous lessons in how to have both. The two are no strangers to the quest for perfection (or space): in addition to the houses and apartments that they’ve designed for their clients, they’ve designed homes for themselves, including a one-bedroom apartment on lower Fifth Avenue and a 3,400-square-foot weekend house in Bucks County, Penn. And when they decided that the apartment wasn’t big enough and the 16-acre country property was too big to maintain, they searched for a place that offered both more space and a connection to the outside world.
They found both in a former industrial building in Brooklyn Heights that overlooks New York Harbor, the Manhattan skyline, the new Brooklyn Bridge Park and, to the south, Red Hook. They looked at several apartments in the building before settling on a three-bedroom on a lower floor, which they felt offered more expansive views. “When you come over here from Manhattan, you really feel like you’re away,” Bentley said.
With its high ceilings, big windows and serene arrangements of vintage and custom-designed furnishings — all unified by a subtle but rich palette of colors with surprising accents — the elegant, nearly 1,800-square-foot apartment seems to be the ideal urban dwelling. It’s spacious yet cozy, and full of beautiful things without looking cluttered. But it wasn’t always so ideal.
Bentley and LaRosa, who are both architects, are lucky: they can look at a space and see its pluses and minuses. For example, the view from the living room was spectacular, but only when you were standing; when you sat, the window mullions censored your sightlines. Having three bedrooms was nice (two of them were turned into his-and-his studios), but their doors were awkwardly placed; in the master bedroom, for instance, there was no wall wide enough for even a queen-size bed. And the kitchen, as is common these days, opened right into the living room.
Their big move was to raise the living room floor by almost a foot, which made the view more accessible and lowered the windowsills (which were replaced with three-inch-thick slabs of travertine) to a more graceful height. Bentley and LaRosa also relocated the doorways in the master bedroom and studios and extended the doorway between the living room and Bentley’s studio to ceiling height, which upped the apartment’s glamour quotient exponentially.
A frosted glass slot in the wall between the studios was replaced with clear glass to “increase the flow along the window wall,” Bentley said. Mirrors were used in the entry, the living room and Bentley’s studio to reflect daylight and views, and the once-open kitchen was partially enclosed by a cabinet that also defines the dining area. LaRosa likens its wide sliding doors of burled English sycamore to a Japanese screen.
One of the biggest — and costliest — strategies the architects employed was a very, very good paint job. They decided on a single color for the walls and ceiling of every room (no seven shades of white here) and chose a different hue for each room. The paint itself is slightly reflective to make everything “higher and deeper” and to give “everything translucence,” LaRosa said. “It’s all background now, but it’s what gives the apartment its sense of solidity.” That, he added, and “a Japanese master” painter.
Then there are the details, for which Bentley, LaRosa and their three fellow principals in B Five Studio are famous. A wall of cantilevered shelves (seemingly weightless but expertly engineered) in the living room organizes books, vases, bowls and the ritual objects that LaRosa has been designing for several years, one of which will be featured in an exhibition at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in September. The dining-area cabinet has a door handle that is a bronze cast of a piece of wood found at Bentley’s family’s cottage in Massachusetts. A small table in the living room — designed, like much of the furniture, by LaRosa — is topped with a delicate cast bronze bird.
The architects are still getting used to their longer commute, but they love their views, and the peace and quiet you get when you unplug from Manhattan. They could still use more storage space (who couldn’t?), but they now have a home that’s both luxurious and extremely functional. “Everyone wants a perfect apartment,” LaRosa said, “but you’re better off tailoring it.”